Georges Cuvier shows that extinction is real

In 1796 the young French anatomist Georges Cuvier read a paper at the Institut de France comparing the bones of living elephants with fossil mammoths and with the remains of a giant ground sloth from Paraguay. He showed that the fossil animals were distinct species from any living today, evidence that species could vanish entirely. This idea, which many thinkers had resisted as incompatible with a perfect creation, laid the foundations of palaeontology. Cuvier later argued that catastrophes had caused repeated extinctions.

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